How I create a Wilderness Map
#osr #d&d
One of my players showed interest in my approach of creating content for the wilderness part of our campaign. I showed him the map I’m currently building, some tools, and also the precious Wilderness Hexplore tables from Jed McClure. In this post I want to consolidate my current approach on creating a wilderness area.
The Nordmark Campaign started without a map. My goal was to keep prep work minimal, and focus on Old School Dungeoncrawl. All we had was a copy of Stonehell, and an abstract tavern nearby. That was all it needed to kick off the campaign that currently counts arount 30 players, and clocks in 50 session during the span of six months. Without a map, I improvised about the surounding and placed the tavern about half an hour from the Dungeons entrance.
But since then, the game itself changed, we grew in players and I learned a lot about old-school megadungeon campaigns. Some players wanted to interact with the world a bit more, factions from Stonhell arised and started to affect the surroundings, rumors to places outside of Stonhell were heard, etc. A map of the milieu became incresingly tempting.
A priciple that remained since the start: Prep should be tons of fun, or remain minimal.
Stonehell remains the default place to go, so if I don’t feel prepared enough for the players to explore the swamps, I tell them just that and we default to Stonehell. It works like a charm.
Given my principle, it may be handy to know what I like during prep.
I like to explore myself and become surprised, so my style of comming up with content ist through random tables and procedures to define relations. I also like to use old classic modules, real places, learning new things and subverting expectations. That’s fun for me. So let’s build a map with that in mind.
The first step was to grab B2 Keep on the Borderlands as a base for a town ans rough kickstart for the wilderness. Then I thought of the greater world, where is the Borderland?
I stumbled accross the Ancient Earth project which allows you to travel through time and visualize how Earth looked like in past eras. Mesmerized I played around, looking up the Wikipedia entries for time periods, and spending too much time pondering about the ephemerality of life. Then I choosed the Late Jurassic period as a good option to inform about the campaigns world global geography. I found a higher resolution map of that period which used the Rectilinear projection.
I looked around the map, and found a place that matched what was already known about the Mileu. Mountains to the west, quite nordish, swampy areas to the east and north. I wanted to redraw the wider area around the keep in my own style, or use a hexmap tool, so a better map projection was needed.
Using the NASA G.Projector tool, I could import the exsisting map, and transform the area of question to a map projection that fitted my needs. Using Blackmarsh from Bat in the Attic Games as size reference, I exported my map cutout with an area of around 162 by 114 miles.
Firing up Worldographer, I set my cutout as background, and started placing known location using the Black & White Classic icons on the map —the Keep (Nordmark), Katarinburg (The bigger city), the swamps, the Death Frost Doom mountain, and the Tower of the Stargazer — respecting known travel times.
I then filled terrain, using the cutout background map as a base, allowing me some creative liberties. Now we have a hexmap with key locations known to playes, and a lot of unkeyed hexes. The next step is to “key” the hexes. That means, to give them some playable content. For that I turned to the uttermost excellent Wilderness Hexplore from Jed McClure. Those tables allow you to roll up hex features like ruins, lairs, temples, fortresses and much more.
I picked a hex-row near the known Milieu — the Keep — and started rolling for every hex if a feature is present. If the dices indicated that there is something, I flipped to the coresponding tables and rolled up the feature, noting it all down in Worldographer. Now, Wilderness Hexplore has its own fantasy flavour and it doesn’t always fit with the 17th century grimdark-gritty aesthetic I am going for. For that reason, I read the tables entries more figuratively and interpreted them with the lens of the 17th century. There are less goblinoids and more feral mercenaries, less gods and more renegade cults of the main church. I also try to connect features to each others. For example: A newly build fort of invaders is a base of the Hobgoblins found in Stonehell Level 2.
Rolling on those tables is fun. And slowly but surely the Wildnerness map is filling up with interesting content and connections. Those aren’t all the tables I use either, UNE, The Universal NPC Emulator is a prime example of tables that I use if I want to flesh out an leader of a radom castle a bit more. There are more tools that I sometimes use, but those listed above are the ones I use the most at the moment. My procedures are ever changing, and this post is just a rough “Slice of Life” of what I do at the time being — that is mid 2023.
How did you came up with your wilderness? Do you have procedures you like to use? Modules one could get inspired by? I would love to get in touch and chat. Feel free to drop me a message via mail felix.drydoginn@fgerling.de.